Alessandra M. Porfidia

Alessandra M. Porfidia was born in 1962 in Rome, Italy, where she graduated at the Academy of the Arts. She was a very young artist when she received her first honourable mention by the Canonica Foundation for Sculpture and (in the same year) her first prize for an artwork in graphics by the National Italian Gymnastic Association. She held her first solo exhibition in 1989 with a presentation by Lorenza Trucchi, a well known Italian expert in the modern arts. The last one occurred in 1999 at West Palm Beach, Florida. In Rome Porfidia took part to various well-known exhibitions and events organized, year by year, by the Roman Association of Modern Art Galleries. In 1995 she won the Fiumara-ARGAM Prize for sculpture. She was also invited to many exhibitions in Italy and abroad as the ones held by the Municipality of Rome, one edition of the Two-Worlds Festival (an event of arts occurring every year both in Spoleto, Italy, and in the US), the International Exhibition "Idioms of Contemporary Sculpture" (Verona 1989), the 6th Biennial Art Exhibition in Cairo (Egypt, 1996), the 12th Quadrennial Exhibition dedicated to the second half of our century ("Latest Generations", Rome, 1996: the most important selection of Italian painters & sculptors operating since 1950), "Sculptures sous le soleil d’Antibes" (France, 1998), the Triennial International Exhibit and Competition of Sculpture in Osaka (Japan, 1998), where she won the Suntory Award. Between 1992 and 1998 Porfidia won various awards from public agencies, as the International prize "Arte Metroroma" resulting in a permanent public installation of artworks. She is a teacher of sculpture at the Academies of Fine Art (Florence, Macerata, Catanzaro, Sassari, all in Italy).

Porfidia’s works have been purchased by public institutions and art collectors, including corporate collections, as the Municipal Museum of Modern Arts in Rome and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Osaka, Japan. Permanent public installations of Porfidia’s works are in Rome, Viterbo, San Benedetto del Tronto, Milan and other localities.

"My work "Big Composition", 1997, is a sculpture in black steel; it is born from the artistic experience done at the steelmaking company Società delle Fucine, at Terni, in Italy, , from 1988 up to 1997, the year of my latest sculpture in this material. I like the vital harmony between man and nature: "Big Composition" is like a declaration of this feeling and idea. In fact, I’m involved and interested in the synthesis between form and organic world. "Big Composition" is a female figure developing into a natural architecture. In 1996 I further started to work out a new idea of sculpture that I represented as the "Theater of the Body". This title reflects my attention to two different realities of our being: the human psychic tensions and the vital presence of our body. It is a multiple Self, that is represented through the tension between the massive and solid forms of concrete works and primitive signs that immediately spring out of the material and vibrate from inside". - Alessandra M. Porfidia

"Alessandra M. Porfidia’s sculptures have an exquisitely aesthetic relationship with space, enlivened here and there by light. Rather than structures or volumes, Porfidia’s works appear as three-dimensional compositions of undoubted definite lyrical charm, where reality and abstraction alternate continuously with each other. A spreading germinal idea of nature is one of her basic characteristics. All the sculptures, whether in marble, concrete, steel or travertine, start from a nucleus, a cell, a seed, from a centrifugal force that explodes, opens up, blossoms and gradually is coming to resemble a human body or a tree, a dance or the waves of the sea. An artist with an aesthetic awareness unusual for her age, Alessandra has developed her own language through the study of a few ideal masters, especially Moore, Matisse and Arp, who may have inspired her careful attention to materials, her preference for clean lines and her interest in soft images that seem to have been generated by never-ending metamorphoses. The sculptures in steel often start from graphics and maintain a spatial rhythm and well-defined profiles with a firm and sinuous touch. But there is also an equally important relationship to painting à plat. Porfidia’s sculptures are not so much forms and volumes, but rather images that create three-dimensional compositions, divided in "situations" of great lyrical charm, where reality and abstraction, humankind and nature interrelate continuously". - Lorenza Trucchi, writer and historian of art

Alessandra M. Porfidia is working also in the field of the graphic arts and painting.